Can Trump Bring About The Second Coming Of Coal?

A statue honoring all West Virginia coal miners stands tall at the Beckley Exhibition Mine in Beckley, W.Va. on Sunday, April 11, 2010. Twenty-nine miners died in the explosion at Massey Energy Co.'s Upper Big Branch mine in nearby Montcoal on Monday. (AP Photo/Amy Sancetta)

The green energy economy has hit a red light, or more precisely, the Great Red Wall erected by Donald Trump. Tonight the president will hold a rally in West Virginia touting his latest plan to resurrect the coal sector that has been vital to that state’s economy — a plan that, by all accounts, would lead to greater emissions.

Trump ran on a platform of reduced regulations and returning the country to “greatness.” But does advocating for a dirtier fuel that is more expensive than some competing energies represent “exceptionalism” or a form of regression that is reminiscent of a bygone era?

“Coal plant retirements are the result of electricity markets weeding out inefficient, expensive, and dirty resources and replacing them with cleaner, cheaper technologies that customers are demanding,” Jonathan Levenshus, Sierra Club’s Senior Campaign Representative for Federal Strategy said. “Bailing out the dying coal industry has already been rejected by FERC once, and this latest scam has been universally panned for good reason. It's the equivalent of trying to bringing back the whale oil industry to replace electric light bulbs.”

Indeed, the Rhodium Group looked at the Trump administration’s proposed policies and compared them to those to that the Obama administration’s had put forth. All are assessed with the Paris climate agreement — a volunteer pact from which Trump has withdrawn. To be clear, any regulation advanced by the White House would be challenged legally, all while Obama’s trademark policy — the Clean Power Plan — wends its way through the court system.

The Paris climate agreement calls on this country to cut its CO2 emissions between 26%-28% by 2025, all from a 2005 baseline. At the current rate, though, the amount would be between 12%-20%. And if the Trump administration has its way, it could be far less than that, at 10% to 18%:

Consider that it has just proposed ditching the Obama administration’s vehicle fuel standard. Instead of going from 35.5 miles per gallon to 54.5 miles gallon by 2025, it would now go only to 37 miles per gallon. Furthermore, Trump would kill Obama’s Clean Power Plan that requires 32% cuts in CO2 emissions by 2030. Together, the auto and electricity sectors account for about 28% each of this country’s CO2 emissions, says the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

“Cheap natural gas and renewables continue to thrust coal out of the market, but after 2025 those same forces push a larger share of zero-emitting nuclear plants into retirement — leading to a rebound in power sector emissions,” Rhodium’s report says.“Transportation remains America’s largest source of emission (and) while more affordable electric vehicles start to bend the curve, we find there is little downward pressure on economy-wide emissions post-2025.”

True Believers

Tonight in West Virginia, Trump will tell a crowd of true believers that coal’s day in the sun will return — that under his proposal, more than 300 coal plants would be kept alive. In effect, Trump would try to make coal plants more efficient by improving their heat rates. Such efficiencies mean cleaner coal plants but they also mean those units will run years longer and ultimately produce more emissions, or everything from mercury to sulfur dioxide to nitrogen dioxide to carbon dioxide.

In comparison, the Clean Power Plan would encourage a wholesale shift from more pollutive energies to cleaner fuels such as natural gas, wind and solar— a point of contention for legal critics, who say that government does not have this authority. States could mandate renewable portfolio standards or the use of more energy efficiency and demand response that gives consumers a head’s up when prices are about to spike so that they can cut their energy usage.

To that end, Trump’s critics say that the Clean Power Plan would drive innovation and produce as much as $59 billion health benefits by 2030. After that time, for every dollar invested in the plan, $7 will be returned.

Industry, conversely, says that the compliance costs would supersede those advantages. Those costs, in turn, would be paid for by consumers -- a dynamic that would hit the country’s manufacturing sectoring, making it less competitive and affecting job creation.

Many of the larger investor-owned utilities, such as American Electric Power, Southern Co. and Duke Energy, are making a dramatic shift away from coal. But the rural cooperatives have less flexibility. The National Rural Electric Cooperative Association says that coal powers 41% of the electricity for its members and that the forced retirement of coal plants would cause them financial hardship.

“The previous administration’s effort to address greenhouse gases was a complex and unnecessarily burdensome overreach that took much of the responsibility for power systems away from the state regulators who know them best,” Karen Harbert, chief executive of the U.S. Chamber’s Global Energy Institute said. “It is why 29 states pushed back against the rules and the Supreme Court blocked their implementation with which an unprecedented stay.”

The Big Question

Is the Second Coming of coal inevitable or is Trump just blowing a lot of hot air? The Sierra Club reports that 270 coal-fired power plants have either closed or have announced they will retire. Meantime, Moody’s Investor Service said that the price of wind power has fallen so far and fast that it could replace coal-fired power plants in the Midwest.

Coal as a percentage of electricity generation has declined from about 50% in 2008 to about 30% percent today — a level that still makes it a key player and one that hardly amounts to the “federal confiscation” of the coal sector, say some experts.

Meantime, a 2011 Harvard University concluded that the external cost of coal -- that amount paid by entities other than the coal or utility companies -- is as much as $523 billion a year. The lead author of the Harvard study, Paul Epstein, said that if healthcare costs were assumed by the coal industry, the price of the associated electricity would at least double. Instead, those costs are paid by taxpayers.

So what is big business to do? Nearly half of the Fortune 500, for example, is taking steps to track and reduce their carbon emissions. Those companies are also trying to improve energy efficiencies and to increase their consumption of renewable energy, according to the Power Forward 3.0 report. And as the cost of the technologies and the fuels drop, companies are striving to do more.

It would therefore stand to reason that the businesses listed in that report support the Clean Power Plan. Practically speaking, their customers are demanding a greener presence and they are meeting that market demand. Some of the companies included are: Bank of America, Microsoft, Facebook, Google, IBM, Procter & Gamble, General Mills and Kellogg Company.

“The shift to clean energy is gaining momentum, and that will only further benefit our health, economy and future,” says Starla Yeh, director of the Policy Analysis Group of the Climate and Clean Energy program at the Natural Resource Defense Council.

Trump’s energy and environmental policies are a throwback to an earlier time. The question now is whether those proposals will cause both the utilities that produce power and the companies that consume it to reduce the pace at which they had been moving to cleaner energies. While consumers will continue to put pressures on companies to go green, the damages — in the interim — could take years to overcome.

With a background in economics and public policy, I have spent two decades covering corporate and political affairs. I have worked as an editor, beat reporter and contributor for several news publications and my focus has been on the global energy sector. My columns have wo...